Today, through use of digital cameras, consumers are able to easily capture and store large collections of personal digital images. These image collections can be stored either locally on a personal computing device or stored remotely on an online photo-management service such as Kodak Gallery, which are capable of maintaining digital image collections for a large number of users and enable users to share their digital images with other users via the internet.
Digital images are composed of pixel data which is used to render a two dimensional digital image on an electronic display or in printed hard copy form. In addition to pixel data, digital images often further include metadata which is data related to and associated with the digital image. Metadata is often useful for organizing and searching of digital images. Some metadata can be provided automatically when the image is first captured by a digital camera device, such as for example, capture date and time metadata. Other types of metadata may include metadata entered by the user such as a caption or ‘favorite’ designation. Other types of metadata may be provided by photo-management software such as a last edited date and time. Another example of metadata is people tag metadata identifying one or more people appearing in the digital image. People tag metadata can be entered either manually by a user or automatically by photo-management software, for example by using facial recognition algorithms.
Another type of metadata which can be associated with digital images is location metadata, such as longitude and latitude coordinate metadata. Location metadata may similarly be provided at the time the image is captured, for example by a digital camera device with a Global Positioning System (GPS) sensor. Alternately, a user may manually enter location metadata at some time after the image has been captured. Location metadata is also useful for organizing a collection of digital images. For example, commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,883,146 describes a graphical user interface (GUI) system for browsing and retrieving digital images by location. This patent is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
However, some users do not always want their digital images to include location metadata. Particularly, a user may wish to not include location metadata when sharing digital image files with other users or when publishing digital images publically, for example on an internet website. Users might, for example, want to publish an image captured at their home, but not necessarily provide the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of their home address.
In order to address this concern, some GPS-enabled cameras provide the ability to disable the location metadata feature so that metadata is not automatically saved every time a picture is captured. However, if the user wants some digital images to include the location metadata and others to not include the location metadata, the user must remember to turn on and off this setting prior to taking each picture. Alternately, the user may use photo-management software currently available to remove the location metadata prior to sharing or publishing each digital image. However, the user must also remember to do this and may not always be aware which digital images in his or her collection include such location metadata. Alternately, some photo-management services allow a user to specify privacy based on which other users can view location metadata for one or more pictures. However, the user must again actively manage which photos have location information shared for each image or group of images where the user wishes to have privacy. As a result, these known methods of addressing the privacy concern with location metadata can result in some images undesirably being shared or published with location metadata or some images undesirably captured without location metadata. An improved system for managing the privacy of digital images having location metadata is therefore desired.